> Blender is way more niche than Thunderbird

Is that true though? I mean sure, more people use email - but I would guess there are more Blender users than Thunderbird users in the world.

There's plenty of competition for an excellent free email experience. Very little for 3D modeling software.

Update: Looks like I guessed wrong. I found some approximate user numbers:

Thunderbird has analytics that show around 10 million active daily installations: https://stats.thunderbird.net/

Blender stats are harder to find. They reported 23 million total downloads in 2024, which suggests daily actives significantly lower than 10 million: https://download.blender.org/foundation/Blender-Foundation-A...

Mozilla invests more time in being a foundation than software so makes sense their donations are higher.

> but imagine what they could do with even more money.

Quite potentially some really great stuff, but I’m skeptical that this is actually a great way to kill a good thing. Ideally money isn’t an issue and everyone is paid well, and somehow the organization managers know how to feel out and draw a line on scale/ambitions.

wow thunderbird gets so much and achieves so little? amazing in a terrible way

I’ve got to imagine there’s examples of orgs stopping donation intake when they get into the “money is nice but we cannot in good faith utilize all this without scaling into something we don’t want to be.”